Vineyard Explosion Creates River of Red Wine

A river of red wine was seen overflowing from a South African winery just outside Cape Town in the Western Cape region on Tuesday after a tank holding 50,000 liters (over 13,000 gallons) of wine collapsed.

Videos of the "traumatic" explosion at Darling Cellars, which saw no injuries, was shared on social media by several users.

Twitter user @lukas_byron, a multimedia journalist at Cape Town Etc, shared a video of the wine spilling towards its surrounding vineyard area.

The same video was also shared by Yolanda Bester on Facebook. "River of red wine....I cannot watch this without thinking how I would have reacted being there. Darling Cellars lost 50 000 litres of red wine.....Depends on the size of your glass, that is about 1000 glasses of wine!," Bester wrote in the Facebook post alongside the video.

That footage was also shared by Twitter user @nickynicey who tweeted: "Heartbreaking scenes from Darling Cellars today, with the rupture of a wine tank."

Another video shared by @lukas_byron captured a chaotic scene inside the winery, with wine dramatically spewing into the air.

"Several tanks allegedly exploded a Darling winery," @lukas_byron tweeted alongside the video, which has had nearly 250 views since it was posted on Wednesday.

In a statement on its Facebook page, Darling Cellars said: "We at Darling Cellars had a very traumatic incident on Tuesday 4 May," noting the wine tank "collapsed when (we suspect) the stand keeping it upright caved in. In the process, it fell onto more tanks leading to a loss of some wine of the new vintage."

"While the loss of wine is a financial reality, we are glad that no one was injured. In this incident, it could have been so much worse.

"There is no immediate risk to the wine supply and we shall overcome this setback," the statement said.

Other recent wine spills

In January 2020 in California, nearly 100,000 gallons of red wine were dumped into a local creek and the Russian River following a leak in a mixing vat at a Sonoma Valley winery.

The spill, large enough to fill eight tanker trucks, overflowed from the Rodney Strong Vineyards building into a storm drain attached to a sanitary sewer system. From there the wine flowed to Reiman Creek before ending up in the river.

The incident was blamed on an "apparent mechanical failure," a spokesperson for Rodney Strong Vineyards said at the time.

Back in 2018, an Italian winery lost over 8,000 gallons of prosecco after a tank began overflowing.

A worker at the winery in the Conegliano area of Treviso in the northeast of the country, captured the spill on video on his phone.

The footage showed foam and liquid covering cement and the sides of the tank. A forklift nearby was also seen getting drenched. The cause of the tank overflow was unknown at the time.